Splunk vs ELK is complicated, depending on what you want to optimize. Probably the biggest issue is the ecosystem around post-search data manipulation.
ES is amazing at searching for tokens and returning documents. The aggregations are also superb -- actually much faster than Splunk under most conditions. Plugins can extend that functionality. Stuff like fuzzy search, regex queries, indexed terms lookups, significant terms aggregations, and nested aggregations can be extremely powerful if you know how to use them well.
ES has a reputation for stability problems. These are mostly solvable by running an appropriately sized cluster with new versions and proper circuit breaker settings. Much of the FUD I've seen about this is incorrect, but the biggest problem remains that you can't kill a misbehaving query or constrain its resource use after it has started; if your circuit breakers aren't working correctly then you're out of luck.
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